


404 - Universe Not Found

by wombatto



Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Dream Team - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Adventure, Best Friends, Dragon Fight, Dream Smp, Dystopia, Fantasy, Minecraft, Minecraft IRL, Other, The Nether (Minecraft), literally just me saying hmm what if minecraft was an edgy dystpoia, no ships btw just friendhships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-14 19:13:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28925613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wombatto/pseuds/wombatto
Summary: Tired of risking their lives for corrupt rulers in their jobs as monster hunters, George and Sapnap yearned for more; they wanted freedom, they wanted lives worth living. They wanted answers. With nothing but stories of failed coups and dead fighters guiding them, they escape and set out on a quest to free themselves from the shackles of their reality. Along the way they meet banished vigilantes, thought to be long dead: Technoblade and Dream, who guide them on their journey for liberation. Over mountains, through oceans and portals, to Hell and back they venture to find The End, where the curtains will finally fall on all the lies. But are truths harder to accept than illusions? Is real life a nightmare one can ever truly wake from?-Basically I said what if Minecraft was real life but also a dystopian adventure fantasy novel with characters from dream smp :) Platonic relationships btw
Relationships: Clay | Dream & GeorgeNotFound & Sapnap (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream & Technoblade (Video Blogging RPF), GeorgeNotFound & Sapnap (Video Blogging RPF)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	404 - Universe Not Found

**Author's Note:**

> Welp I hope you enjoy this, it's gonna be long(ish), there's gonna be twists, and shit will go down. I'm estimating this to have 9 chapters, maybe 10 because I like to keep chapters under 4000 words. This is my first attempt at writing in the fantasy genre, I usually write romance, so let's hope this goes well lmfao
> 
> I really love getting comments so if you have any thoughts, drop them below!!
> 
> I hope you enjoy :)

**CHAPTER ONE – [MONSTER HUNTER]**

The spider shrieked and hissed its last breath as George withdrew his sword from its stomach, its blood beginning to trickle down his arm towards his elbow. Into the new silence, he panted, his hot breath forming clouds in the icy night-time air. Blinking calmly, George looked around at what he’d done. Scattered around were corpses upon corpses, lifeless bodies of various creatures he’d slain throughout the treacherous night. Most people were too afraid to confront these creatures: giant spiders with glowing red eyes, skeletons with their jarring stumbling movement and wild archery, slumped remains of hellish exploding monsters, zombified lumps which crawled and groaned, all slain by George’s skilful hand. On the job he was cold, concentrated, just like the other monster hunters who were sent out into the night to defend the city. He was good - the best in the realm.

“You collect the remains, I’ll keep an eye out,” George mumbled to his partner as he eyed the horizon; the sun waited for its cue to bathe the world in golden light – safety at last. His partner nodded and began carefully creeping over the bodies, harvesting whatever he could. From the spiders he extracted string and eyes, from the zombies, scrap metal and rotten flesh. From the exploding monsters – creepers – he took gunpowder. He was skilled, too, and worked efficiently alongside George. They had become close friends on the job, saving each other’s lives was a daily occurrence.

In this realm, the government named the citizens, giving them generic codenames randomly generated at birth. George resented his government name, in fact, the generator had crashed when he was being registered, displaying the message **Error 404 – Not Found,** leaving him with the affectionate codename ‘404’. He preferred his close friends to simply call him ‘George’. His partner had gotten luckier, the machine spat out ‘Sapnap’, and he’d decided to keep the name.

As the sun crept into the sky, George and Sapnap trudged back to the city centre, where they’d return their weapons and scraps, and receive their pay from the government facility they worked for.

“Bag’s full today, Sapnap,” George smiled, eyeing the bulging satchel slung over his partner’s shoulder. “Lots of loot.”

“We better get a good bonus,” Sapnap replied, panting as he walked with the heavy bag.

“They’ll find a way to cheat us of fair payment, I’m sure,” George muttered, rolling his eyes. “They always do.”

Sapnap chuckled bitterly in response.

As they approached the city centre, they saw other hunters and their partners approaching with tired faces. They were all in various states of disarray, some drowning in blood and goop, some with torn clothes and tattered shoes, some carrying broken bows and empty quivers. George winced. They’d be penalised for returning with arrows missing in whatever way the guards saw fit. The severity of their punishments depended on how bored the guards were at the time.

In the heart of the city was their destination, a huge monolithic building with the word _MOJANG_ lit in neon red across the front - the city’s name. The luminous red sign swathed the streets below under a constant red glow, ominous and domineering. A citizen’s silent reminder of who owned them.

As they entered the facility, George and Sapnap cast their eyes to the floor. The government and their specially selected guards didn’t like to be looked in the eye – George had learned that the hard way. He didn’t mind though, he had very little desire to be face-to-face with them. Every night, he risked his life, endured physical and psychological torture to protect them, and he didn’t even get thanked for it.

Sapnap dropped off his bag at the hand-in, where the staff members began to sort the loot into crates. Different parts would be shipped off to various factories in the city where they’d be processed for use. The string could be made into bows or fishing rods, the spider eyes could be used in brewing for potions, and the scraps would be salvaged in a multitude of ways.

At a different counter, George returned his weapons. He gave back his bow, arrows and sword, all coated in blood and dust. He returned his armour, too, to be repaired and cleaned up for the next hellish night. Handing back armour was always the worst part of the shift, George resented that he had to walk around unprotected, while the guards were given enchanted gear just to stand around in. George hated, too, that it was illegal for citizens to possess enchanted items, let alone perform their own magic, while the government and their friends fooled around with sorcery for kicks. George sighed. At least he had a job. Not everyone was as lucky as he, to be born with the combination of skill and bravery needed to be a monster hunter. As soon as he showed combat competency as a child, they recruited him and trained him up. A government killing machine who now had a moral obligation to fight monsters at night, because who else would, if not he?

As George waited for Sapnap, he glanced around the facility. Despite the modern exterior, the inside of the building felt ancient. Crumbling paint fell on to the dusty blood-stained concrete floors, and the same posters had been haphazardly taped to the walls since he started working here years ago. There were two worn images, two young men stood side-by-side staring at the looker with empty eyes. The caption below the image was worn and faded, but George could just about make it out: _traitors beware, this is your fate._ George’s chest tightened. The men in the image were infamous in Mojang. Years ago, long before George’s memory stretched back, two trusted government guards tried to gather soldiers and start a revolution. They were stamped out quickly – violently. George remembered being told the story at school, being shown pictures of where the traitors were sent. The colour purple flashed to mind. George’s vision swirled violet.

“No fuckin’ bonus, it was the heaviest bag today,” Sapnap complained, wiping sweat off his furrowed brow as George peeled his eyes away from the poster.

“I’m half tempted to switch professions,” George lamented, the men from the poster still on his mind. “Whatever, I need to wash this blood off me before I ferment in this sun,” he said, squinting up at the sky through the facility’s expansive windows. The days seemed to get shorter and shorter.

“Catch you tonight, then,” Sapnap said, and the two went their separate ways after trudging out of the building.

Night shifts were hard on George. Barely touching sunlight, his skin was pale and grey; freckles he had as a child hadn’t shown themselves in years. His eyes were adapted to the dark - bright lights and the scorching sun were painful and blinding, burning up his skull from his retinas outwards. He was accustomed to cooler night-time airs; summer days quickly became unbearable to exist in, George often resorted to sitting in cold baths of water to cool off. A few times he’d fallen asleep, woken up with wrinkled skin and a half-drained tub, cursing himself.

After a restless sleep – which was typical for George, who was plagued by nightmares about monsters and losing his best friend to them – it was already time for another shift. After putting on his blood-stained clothes which he’d given up trying to clean long ago, he head over to the Mojang facility to collect his weapons and armour, ready for another night of near-lethal adrenaline rushes as he fought for his life against hellish creatures that roamed in the dark.

When he arrived, he could see Sapnap waiting for him, small talking with other hunters as they all waited for their respective partners.

“Name?” The guard asked him, rummaging through a box of keys for the lockers which enclosed all the hunters’ gear. George’s blood boiled. He felt an anger he’d never even been close to experiencing before, his cheeks flushing with a deadly rage.

“Oh, come _on._ I’m your best fucking hunter, you _know_ my name,” he accused, his fists clenched. His eyes flicked to the poster of the two men. He could almost hear them encouraging him.

“Excuse me?” The guard replied, leaning across the desk to closely meet George’s eyes.

George’s voice raised, “You heard me!” From around the huge lobby, heads turned to see what was causing the commotion. A silence fell among the waiting hunters, who knew what was coming next. Sure enough, the guard swung his fist and delivered a powerful punch to George’s jaw, which landed with an audible _thud_. George hit the ground, but stood back up defiantly as Sapnap sprinted over, holding George’s arm protectively when he arrived.

“What the fuck are you doing, dude?” Sapnap asked quietly through gritted teeth. George wiped away the blood pouring from his nose with the back of his hand and swallowed hard. There was silence; everyone watched with held breath. The guard smiled smugly, dusting off his knuckles.

“Let’s try this again, shall we?” he taunted. “Name?”

George’s silence said everything he couldn’t. Sapnap panicked and replied.

“404.”

“There we go,” the guard laughed as he turned to unlock a small metal door, pulling out George’s armour, axe, and bow, and handing it to him. George snatched up his gear and stormed into the changing room to suit up, Sapnap following closely.

“Why the hell did you do that?” he asked once out of earshot of everyone.

“He was being an asshole,” George replied, wiping more blood off his face.

“Is your nose okay?”

“Yeah,” George grimaced, “only a scratch.”

With the air thick and tense, Sapnap and George wordlessly trudged out of the facility and off into the night as the sun held itself up for its last few minutes in the sky. The land before them was expansive, a mixture of terrains, but George always wondered if there was more beyond the borders. His dream was to see snow; he’d heard stories of lands where crystallised water fell from the sky in soft droplets, coated the ground like a blanket. He heard that snow could chill you all the way to your bones, land shyly on your tongue but rage in avalanches, make you walk slowly, sinking you like sand, but slide you across its surface at the speed of light. It could pack to form shelter and statues but melt away in the warmth of your hand. George longed for something new.

“Why won’t they let us outside the borders?” George lamented, absentmindedly scratching his leg with the butt of his axe.

“Apparently its safer in the border, they say that outside the city there’s even more monsters than here.”

“How do we know that’s even true, though?”

Sapnap sat on this, mulled it over. “I don’t know.” There was a long pause. “Hey, are you okay?”

George stared off into the distance with an empty mind. “I just want to see snow; do you think it’s real?”

“I’ve never seen anything like how it’s described,” Sapnap replied, “I’m not sure.”

“It is real,” an unfamiliar voice chirped up from behind them. Sapnap and George turned quickly, raising their weapons by instinct, George holding his breath as if he were starting a hunt.

“Show yourself!” Sapnap demanded. Slowly, a woman approached, darkness slipping off her face as she came into view. She had a small frame and was dressed in white robes; she was much older than Sapnap and George. She had no armour and no weapons, her delicate hands clutched a few pieces of folder paper.

“What are you doing here, it isn’t safe,” George said as he lowered his axe, softening his stance to avoid intimidating her.

“I want to give you something,” she said in her soft voice, looking around cautiously. George strained to hear her. “I’m Niki.”

“Niki? I know the name,” Sapnap replied.

“I’m head navigator for Mojang, I probably drew the maps you use to get around the city…” she said. Sapnap nodded in recognition.

“What do you want to give us?”

“These,” Niki said, thrusting the wads of papers into George’s hands. Hesitantly, he unfolded them, revealing intricate hand-drawings showing trails, secret passages, terrain markers and a small black dot labelled _village_. He stared at it in awe.

“What am I looking at?” he asked.

“These are maps of outside the border,” she replied. Sapnap and George glanced over at each other with perplexed expressions. “One day when I was out mapping, I came across this small settlement. It had houses, and farmlands, and lakes, but it was abandoned.”

Sapnap got closer and looked over George’s shoulder at the map, his eyes darting around it wildly, lost in the novelty of it. “So there _is_ stuff outside the border.”

“Mojang know a lot, but they don’t know about this one,” she said. “I marked it on this map and hid it, nobody who’s alive knows about the village, just me.”

“And now us…” George whispered. “Why are you telling us this?” He panicked suddenly, shoving the maps back into Niki’s arms.

“I’ve been watching you, 404. You remind me of someone I used to know,” she said. “While I was out mapping for Mojang, I was also scouting for a secret organisation. It was the perfect excuse,” she said in a hushed tone, drawing closer to Sapnap and George. “Years ago, there was an attempt at a coup, two guards wanted to overthrow Mojang.”

George’s eyes widened; his hands began to shake. His mind fell on the sunken faces of the two men from the posters.

Niki continued, “You two remind me of them. Young, passionate, desperate for more. I can see that you want to escape, and I want to help you.”

“What do you mean escape?” George asked.

“Don’t you want to be free, 404? Don’t you want to see the snow?”

George’s breath caught. “I do.”

“Then take these maps, find the village and be free. You remind me of him, you do.”

“Of who?” George asked.

Niki replied, “Of _The Blade_.”

George swallowed the weight of her words. Niki once again held out the maps, and George accepted them, tucking them deep in his kit bag for safe keeping.

“Thank you,” he said. Niki nodded and turned on her heel, creeping back towards the direction of the city silently. George and Sapnap sat in silence and watched monsters approach slowly over the horizon, scuttling legs and harrowing groans drawing ever nearer.

“A village, huh?” George thought aloud.

“I like the sound of it,” Sapnap replied. “And who knows what else is hidden out there.”

George hummed in response, contemplation set deep on his face. The sky darkened as stars began to scroll overhead.

“If we leave, what happens to everyone else?”

“We set them free,” Sapnap responded. George scrunched his face questioningly. Sapnap responded, “There’s gotta be something else out there, something Mojang don’t want us to know about. If _The Blade_ wanted to use the village as a secret base, it must have been important. He must have known something that we don’t.”

“Knowledge that got him killed,” George responded. “Him and the _other one._ ”

“ _The Dream_.”

George hummed in acknowledgement.

“What if they kill us, too? Like they killed those two?”

“So fucking what,” Sapnap laughed indignantly. “Are you happy here? Are you, George? Do you have anything to lose?”

George thought about this.

“I have you.”

“Exactly. If we die out there, we die _together._ We die like _brothers._ ”

George was silent. Spiders hissed in the distance, their red eyes turning towards the city.

“Like brothers…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a set-up for the adventure, now the good shit can start happening!!!
> 
> Let me know what you thought :) 
> 
> Stay safe out there <3


End file.
